This week’s news was all about the new iPhone, but our top story was about something completely different: Java, and whether or not you need it. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010: The Internet of Things really is a series of tubes; augmented reality may save the planet; and we mapped the oil spill using the real-time Web . Read on for more. Sponsor Top Stories of the Week Who Needs Java? Probably Not You How to Jailbreak iOS 4.0 for iPhone 3G Jailbreaking iOS 4.0? How To Keep a Jailbreak For iPhone 3G or 3GS OpenDNS Launches FamilyShield, Free Parental Controls Service for Web New iPhone Software Arrives Today – Can You Run it? More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web How Twitter Annotations Could Bring the Real-Time and Semantic Web Together Online Language Learning Company Babbel Adds Voice Recognition Tool Mapping the Oil Spill in Real Time More Real-Time Web coverage . Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Augmented Reality Can Augmented Reality Help Save the Planet? More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We’re pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb’s latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user’s view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Mobile Web iPhone 4: Your Burning Questions Answered Google Activates Android “Kill Switch,” Zaps Useless Apps Developers Betting on Android for Long-Term Success, Says Surveyy More Mobile Web coverage Internet of Things Google, GE & Others Prototype Wireless Mote to Connect Any Device to Smart Grid The Internet IS a Series of Tubes: Real-Time Mapping of the London Underground More Internet of Things coverage Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. Is Venture Capital Broken? Posterous and Ambition: A Lesson for Startups? Delicious Founder, AOL Exec Launch Hacker Angels ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Oxygen: A Desktop Network Connected to the Cloud Architects of Amazon Web Services Launch Nimbula, Promise an OS for the Cloud Weekly Poll: Is Salesforce.com Chatter Really That Unique? Does it Matter? ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. Antivirus Product Testing is Changing, Whether Vendors Like it or Not 3 Up-and-Coming Collaboration Suites Google Apps Now Supports Multiple Domains Enjoy your weekend everyone. Subscribe to Weekly Wrap-up You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrap-up by RSS or by email below. RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form: Discuss
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Weekly Wrap-up: Who Needs Java? Jailbreaking iOS 4.0, Free Web Parental Controls, And More…
As Online Video Continues to Boom, Fox Goes Mobile with Bitbop
Numbers released from comScore today show that U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos online in the month of May, up from just over 30 billion in April . Hulu served up nearly 1.2 billion videos last month, nearly 3.5% of the overall market, while Google remained supreme, accounting for 43% of the market – a whopping 14.6 billion videos – with its powerhouse property, YouTube . Still, Hulu, a place where many watch full episodes of network television, is slowly inching from the pack, and Fox Interactive Media, sitting near the bottom of comScore’s rankings, wants a piece of the action. They’re target? Mobile. Sponsor Back in January , Hulu managed just over 900 million videos, 2.8% of the overall market and nearly twice as much as the next highest ranked provider, Microsoft. Since then, they’ve grown slightly to 3.5%, fending off the other providers and cementing their position as a leading online video provider. Hulu’s 43.5 million unique visitors in May watched an average of 27 videos each, which is more than a quarter of the number watched by YouTube visitors. Fox Launches Mobile Hulu-esque Subscription Service Fox Interactive Media, which ranks 9th on comScore’s top 10 based on total videos served, announced today that it is taking a stab at mobile video subscription service with what it calls Bitbop . Is it an iPhone app? No. An Android app? No. A mobile website? No. It’s an application for the BlackBerry. BitBop, available on the BlackBerry Bold, Curve and Tour models, is a free application that allows users to watch many of the same TV shows and movies they know from Hulu directly on their phones. While the app is free to download, it comes with a subscription fee – $9.99 a month – to access content. Family Guy, The Office, 30 Rock, Glee, CSI, Friday Night Lights – all the major players are present and accounted for. If you’re asking yourself why the service is only available on the Blackberry – and why wouldn’t you – it’s because Fox has inked an exclusive deal with BlackBerry makers RIM (Research In Motion) . It’s a curious partnership, since the majority of BlackBerry owners use their devices mainly for work and enterprise functionality – not exactly the kind of people who are more like to watch online video on their mobile device, if you asked me. Still, it will be interesting to see how it plays out and if Fox can boost their low video market share numbers. There is certainly a market for on-demand mobile video – the success of Netflix’s iPad app and the anticipation of its iPhone app can speak to that thread. Whether that market is on BlackBerry devices is yet to be seen, but this partnership could bode well for both parties. Discuss
Smashing the Passive TV: New Check-in Apps Make Entertainment Social Again
Do you want to chat with friends who are watching the same TV shows you are or reading the same books? Do you want to check in to record and share a history of your offline entertainment activities? Many startups think you will and the number of apps for that is growing fast. The latest entry into the field is from GetGlue , a startup that offers a popular plugin for social Web browsing, that just announced its iPhone app for entertainment check-ins today. The service stands out in the field as one of the only offerings that features books and other activities, and it has an excellent recommendation feature that’s sure to be adopted by competitors in time. What are other startups doing in this market? Below we offer a feature comparison between GetGlue and competitors HotPotato , Kickfour , Tunerfish , Miso and Philo . Sponsor How The Apps Work Are you having fun watching a TV show, listing to a song, reading a book or just thinking about something? Entertainment check-in apps will let you find the title of what you’re engaged with, and then “check in” to record the experience, leave a comment, see what other people and your friends are doing at the time, and more. Most of these services offer badges, rewards and elite status designations, sometimes with editorial benefits. Additional promotional activities are sure to come from advertisers in time as well. It’s an emerging field, but one that’s beginning to feel crowded already. The TV industry is hoping these kinds of applications will help it strike back against audience attrition and provide a new channel for content producers to market their work. “From a business perspective,” says Comcast’s social technology group senior director of product, Mike Berkley, “it’s about providing awesome marketing channels for content providers. The analogy is that Foursquare (in theory) is a great marketing tool for local businesses… these TV check-in apps are a great tool for TV networks.” From a user’s perspective, there is potential for fundamental change in the way we do entertainment. “TV as a form factor does not natively invite interaction,” Berkley says, “but it is an ideal consumption experience for rich media. That’s why mobile and iPad are so important, as the input devices.” In several cases, entertainment check-in apps are going beyond TV, as well. Which App to Use? Here’s how six of the players in this market look, feature by feature, as far as we can tell so far. Beyond Checking In What’s the biggest problem with most of these apps? Not enough people use them yet, so it’s not terribly social. There are a few apparent exceptions. Miso has Google funding and is already well on its way towards popularity. World Cup games are actively discussed on Miso, in real time. The iPad app Miso announced yesterday is absolutely dreamy looking. HotPotato is the best designed, and at tech events can provide a common back channel. GetGlue already has a popular Web presence, so it’s far more active than some of the others. Still, they need something more. That’s where GetGlue is strongest: It offers personalized recommendations, including among new releases from the world of music, movies and books. That means it provides immediate value, even if no one else you know uses the app. GetGlue even includes a section for topics you’re thinking about, complete with viewable YouTube movies about those topics. Long term as well, check ins alone are unlikely to prove sufficiently captivating. “The critical thing,” says social mobile engineer and researcher Nitya Narasimhan , “will be the kinds of add-on features (beyond check-in) that can create stickiness. Right now, the focus seems to be just shared experiences but I think that features like the social discovery credits where you are credited for incentivizing someone else to watch the program – those are interesting.” That’s what the Comcast-built Tunerfish does, in fact. If someone else clicks on a link to a show that you’ve shared, you get credit for that in the system. What will all of this look like in the future? “It’s hard to say,” says Comcast’s Berkley, “because there is so much rapid change at the moment. The TV screen is about to explode. There will be tons of innovation coming to TV over the next 12 months – TV will be dramatically redefined.” Are you ready to get social, via mobile, with your offline activities? Discuss
How to Take Your Company Mobile Today
As mobile phone penetration continues to surge, the years-old hype about the mobile Web being the next big thing is no doubt coming true. But despite all of the industry gurus, conference keynotes and trade magazine articles imploring you to get your business ready for the mobile space, it’s not always easy to know where to begin. Sure, you could hire a team of top-notch mobile developers, but not every business owner has that luxury, especially with the economy still in limbo. Here are a few tools to get started: Sponsor Make Your Website Mobile Friendly Your company’s website may be getting you noticed on the desktop, but what happens when people try to access it from their phones? Probably a lot of pinching, scrolling and squinting. There are a few ways to get your existing site ready for mobile display with minimal coding and development required. One such tool is a hosted solution called Mofuse , which offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface from which to manage mobile content, design and ads. Plug in an RSS feed URL to pull content in from your company blog (or any source), or simply publish static pages with the most pertinent info. When it’s ready, Mofuse provides several flavors of code snippets for redirecting mobile users from your full-size desktop site to the more mobile-friendly version. Another option is Mobify , a freemium service that takes your existing website and strips it down to only the essentials you want your mobile users to see. The result is a clean, highly usable design that displays for the users who visit your site from their phones. Although they have different pricing plans and feature sets, both Mofuse and Mobify come with custom domains, analytics, ad server integration and e-commerce options. Get Started With QR Codes Although not yet as common in the U.S. as they are in Japan, QR (quick response) codes are popping up more and more in commercial and marketing contexts. These square barcode-esque patterns can be printed on any page or real-world surface to enable users with a QR-equipped mobile phone to scan it and then be be redirected to any URL. These could be used in print advertisements to send users to your mobile site for more information or for special promotional offers. While the jury is still out on if and when QR codes will see widespread adoption in the West, it’s easy to get started using one of the many QR code generators that are out there, including Kaywa QR Code , Delivr and QR Stuff to name a few. Keep it Social This may seem like a no-brainer and the last thing the world needs is somebody else espousing the magic of the social Web, but we would be remiss to discuss going mobile without touching on the most obvious and simple way of getting your brand onto people’s phones. Let’s face it: people access sites like Facebook and Twitter from their phones all day long. If your company has a social media strategy, then it already has the beginnings of a mobile strategy. Phone photo by Thiago Felipe Festa . QR photo by cocreatr . Discuss
Jailbreaking iOS 4.0? How To Keep a Jailbreak For iPhone 3G or 3GS
Earlier we published a guide on how to jailbreak the iPhone 3G or iPod Touch (2nd generation) using the jailbreak tool known as “redsn0w.” However that tool, still in beta format at the time of publishing, did not support a jailbreak for owners of an iPhone 3GS. But there’s a second tool called “sn0wbreeze,” which does. This software also supports jailbreaking the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch second generation. However, sn0wbreeze is a Windows-only tool and even more importantly, it is meant just for devices which have already been jailbroken. If you upgraded to the new iOS 4.0, you cannot use sn0wbreeze. Sponsor Jailbreaking vs. Unlocking For the uninitiated, “jailbreaking” refers to the ability to open up a device in order to install unapproved, third-party applications. Given both AT&T and Apple’s restrictions regarding the iPhone, this process is a must for many Apple device owners. Jailbreaking allows access to many new functions, including turning the phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot , being able to fully customize the phone down to its icons, forcing Wi-Fi only apps to run over 3G and, for those whose older devices don’t support all of iOS 4’s new features, jailbreaking offers some viable alternatives.
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